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Some people think there is no such thing as a "stupid question", such people probably ask a lot of stupid questions themselves.  Of course there are stupid questions in all worlds.  Most are not real questions, no they are questions written by people that claim to be experts or position themselves as such just so they can answer them or affirm them (generally incorrectly) at least that seems to be the case in regard to SEO.  In other words most stupid questions are asked by people that already have both an answer that is wrong and an agenda that is self serving.

Lets look at three of my favorite Stupid Questions about SEO.

1.  IS SEO Dead? or Is it dying? or Will it die someday? or any version of this.

The answer is of course no, there have been countless cases made for the death of SEO over the last two years, none I will dignify with a link.  People that take this stance don't even in general know what SEO is.  SEO is optimizing sites and pages for search marketing in a way so that you benefit with out paying for the traffic at least that is the best definition I can give you right now.  In other words doing what works best to get a site targeted traffic with out paying the search engines for it.

Now to say this practice will stop working or will die is like saying all radio is going to be replaced with nothing but ads.  In the world of search the organic listings are the show and the paid listings are the show sponsors.  Honestly the organic results could stand alone but the paid ones could not.  If you doubt it look at the decline of GoTo/Overture.  Why did it happen?  They stacked every paid result above every organic one and it was a poison pill had Yahoo not bought them and changed the format the entire thing woud have amounted to nothing but another casualty of the Dot Com Bubble.

The reality is the more data that is accessible the harder it will be to find.  There will always be a need for search and no matter how providers serve the results there will be ways to improve your rank and exposure by serving them what they are looking for.  These "ways" are SEO, they may change but the ability to manipulate any search system simply by understanding how it works will always exist. 

Does SEO from 1996 work today?  No!  Does that mean SEO is dead or dying, only someone who is totally blind to real SEO and it also trying to pretend they are actually informed would ask such a dumb question. 

2.  Will Web2.0, Social Sites, Social Networking, etc replace Search?

This is a stupid question because all of those things are a form of search!   They are type of human enhanced search, blog search engine, feed monitoring but they all sort data into specific types so people can find what they are looking for.  Simply put if all a person does is try to rank sites in Google they are not an SEO, not in 2007 anyway.  Optimizing search is as much about delicious, youtube and MySpace today as it is about Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Honestly this is just another angle on question one. 

Hell to put it simple I can manipulate a lot of Web2.0 sites and social search far easier then Google!

3.  Can Anyone Do SEO?

OK this question is only stupid based on who asks it and in what context.  What I mean is if a new person to search marketing asks this question in an attempt to learn what is required to get a site ranked for a term clearly you would have to be a jerk to call the question stupid.  However, when a "self appointed genius" asks this question only so they can show how "easy SEO is", the question is like asking if anyone can play basketball.

Sure anyone can play basketball!  Can everyone play NBA basketball?  Hell no!  I am a 230 lb 5'10" white dude that can't jump.  So can I play in the NBA?  Now in high school I was good enough to make the High School team if I had wanted to but no amount of work, no amount of effort would have ever gotten me on a team at even a community college.

So can anyone do SEO?  Sure!  Can anyone get some results?  Of course but the real stars of SEO are way beyond just getting a rank or even 100 ranks.  The stars are those who are creative and can come up with ways to use their skills in a way that leverages multiple concepts.  They don't just rank terms, they actually create markets, they rank a term no one cares about then they use SEO to build a brand around their own terms!

Final Thoughts

Look all three of these questions are valid when asked for the right reasons by the right people.  Yet they drive me crazy when proposed just to set up answers by people who are totally uniformed or worse yet partially informed.  It is the partially informed that are the most dangerous. My dad used to tell me "a clock that is wrong by 10 minutes is dangerous, one off by several hours is not.  You will know the one off by a few hours is wrong, the one off by 10-20 minutes will make you late for work and cost you a job".  He would then follow it up by reminding me that even a broken clock "was right twice a day and off by 10 minutes 4 times a day".

The message - be careful what you listen to in the SEO and the entire Internet Marketing World.  Now I don't claim to always be right but what I seldom do to my readers is speak in absolute terms.  When I talk about a major event or change I try to say things like

"pay attention to the possibility"

or

"this might effect current efforts"

Not with absolute statements that are pure nonsense.  I wrote this post simply because of how often I see people who are using these angles to try to gather just a few minutes of fame with them.  Then I have to talk to clients who have decided SEO does not work, PPC is akin to burning money or SEO's rip people off because "anyone can do it".

So next time you hear, there is no such thing as a stupid question, just remember it all depends on who is doing the asking and why they are asking the question in the first place.   

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: stupid questions, seo questions, internet marketing, search marketing, sem, consulting, death of seo

Popularity: 8% [?]

I just got the news that North Texas won its' bid for the 2011 Super Bowl and I am pretty happy about it with a lot of help from.  A great bid package was presented by former Cowboy Roger Staubach. Now I know this is not a typical post for the Comtech Blog but there is a business lesson here.

Note the title "Make that Arlington"!  Now you may know the Cowboys as the Dallas Cowboys and that will be the name they keep, however, starting in 09 with the opening of the new stadium they really should be called the Arlington Cowboys.  Because just like the Texas Rangers they Cowboys are moving to Arlington and setting up shop in a new beautiful stadium right across from their baseball playing cousins.  Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has already gone on record saying that the new Stadium was "a key factor" in winning the bid for the 2011 Super Bowl and anyone with an honest bone in their body would have to admit that indeed is the case.

Now the City of Dallas was given every opportunity to bring the Cowboys to back to big D after loosing the team to the suburb of Irving in 1971, but decided not to engauge in "corporate welfare". 

The issue went before Arlington Voters about 18 months ago and passed by only a 2% margin.  To close the deal the City of Arlington kicked in 325 million dollars to bring the Cowboys and their new stadium to their city.  So for 325 million Arlington Texas landed the number one football franchise (from a marketing standpoint) in the world.  

The promise was that the team and the new stadium would return far more to the local economy then they cost.  Now the projections for the 2011 Superbowl is that it will alone bring in from 300-400 million dollars to the North Texas area, much of which of course will flow into the City of Arlington.

So with one Super Bowl the return of investment is just about secured!

This may shock you but even as a Arlington Texas resident I am not really a Cowboy's fan in fact I am the arch enemy of any true blue Dallas fan, the evil and dark fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers!  

Yet before everything else I am a business person and I look at a business deal not as a football fan but in simple terms of is the decision the right one financially long term for all of those involved.  Looking at this one it is clear that Dallas blew it and Arlington voters made the right decision.

Think about this concept when you evaluate business deals, think long term and upside potential.  The short term (good or bad) is seldom the way to think about important business decisions,

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: dallas cowboys, super bowl, football, jerry jones, arlington texas, dallas texas, texas

Popularity: 7% [?]

I was just reading the latest issue of OMMA Magazine and they have a list of the top 50 spending advertisers from 2006, there is nothing new here because ClickZ tends to publish this data every month.  Here is the March 2007 Report for example.  What I found interesting is that they broke out the top ten and showed what they spend in off line advertising.  

Now OMMA did not break it down as to what precentage of spend these advertisers spent online vs off line nor did they even directly compare the two pieces of data.  I have always wanted to really look at this aspect of budget from the largest spenders but never took the time to gather all the data.  Well with it all right there I decided to create a simple table to look at this, below are the results which may raise an eyebrow or two. 

As you can see there is one big thing that stands out!  The precentage of total spend made up by online advertising has a huge variance in it.  However this is due to the total spend, not the total online spend.  Some players like AT&T spend enough to be #2 online over all but that only makes up about 7.5% of their total ad spend per year. 

Now look at Dell, their online spend is about 30 million dollars less then AT&T yet it makes up a healthy 18.8% of their total spend.  

As you move down from Dell realize that less then 20 million dollars seperate the #3 from the #10 position with many spots only differing by a few hundred thousand dollars while the off line spend bounces like mid east oil chart.

Finally note that the lowest percentage of online spending is by General Motors (5.63%) while the highest spend if from Apollo Group (98.4%).

Now the reality is a lot could be read into these numbers and doing so would be a mistake.  Of course the online spend is close company to company because that is how they were ranked yet taking a look at how the biggest players are spending their total ad budgets is interesting and enlightening. 

So let's take a look just for fun at the top ten online advertisers in total spending ranked by percentage of total spend…

1. Apollo Group
2. Experian
3. TD Ameritrade
4. IAC/Interactive Corp
5. Vonage
6. Dell
7. Walt Disney
8. AT&T
9. Verizon
10. General Motors

 So what do these numbers mean to you?  What precentage of spend do your company or typical client allocated to online vs. off line sales?  More interesting, find the company with the closest percentage to your own and compare their business model, target demographic and niche to yours.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: Vonage, AT&T, Dell, Walt Disney, General Motors, Experian Group, Verizon, Apollo Group, IAC/Interactive Corp, Ameritrade, APOL, VG, ATT, DIS, GM, EXPN, VZ, IACI, AMTD

Popularity: 13% [?]

Ok this may seem a bit odd given I just said Donald Trump's Blog sucked a few days ago.  The reality though was my post was never a slam on Trump or even his blog.  It was simply to help my readers understand what is an emerging trend in blogging - large companies jumping into blogging and then trying to blog in the same manner that they write content for traditional marketing.

Sure Trump's Blog does this but that was not the real point, the point was so do most larger companies when they start a blog.  In fact Trump's group has made some real headway on correcting this issue and I can also state that after talking to Josef Katz on Friday afternoon that more changes are on the way.  Joseph is a very smart marketer and we had a great chat about online marketing, the direction of the Trump blog and some typical marketing stuff like statistics and sales techniques.  

After chatting with Josef I decided to look anew at the Trump Blog, specificly for some of the changes I had missed recently when I stopped reading it.  Here is what I found.

1.  The articles on real estate are very good.  This may be something I have over looked because I don't really get into real estate very much.  There is a great deal of insight available some of the best is in fact from Barry Lenson who I debated with quite heavily in the comments to my orginal post.

2.  Trump does not hose over his commenter's with "nofollow links" in his comments section.  Just like our blog here you get credit for your links in your comments on the Trump Blog.  Good to know, now be responsible with this and only post legit comments but enjoy the links you get in return for them.

3.  The Trump team not only allows comments they allow some pretty negative ones and answer them with respect and fact.  That is important, if you can't allow your readers to criticize you, then your blog is a sham.   

4.  Trump is posting a LOT MORE now.  People visit the Trump Blog to hear his voice and views, he is now posting about twice a week, this alone has the blog feed back in my RSS reader.

Anyone that read my negative post about the Trump blog with out reading my blog often or from outside the world of search engine and internet marketing may have come to the conclusion that I have it in for "The Donald".  Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact I have cited the Trump blog twice in previous posts in quite a positive tone.  Those two articles were,

Donald Trump knows Web 2.0?

and

Putting Together an eLearning Program

Also when Mark Cuban called Trump a "chump" and bashed his blog and sided with Rosie O'Donnell (who nauseates me!) I defended the Trump Blog on Cubans blog, have a look at comment #108.  

In short I hope my readers can see my negative criticism on the Trump Blog for what it really was.  A lesson in blogging for corporate level executives and companies trying to make a blog as "slick" as typical marketing. 

As for the Trump team after getting a bit of information on what is coming (which I won't do Mr. Katz the disservice of leaking), I can tell you that Trump's team is on the right track.  Look for the Trump Blog to get better and better.  Mr. Katz may also be a guest on an upcoming Podcast that will soon be launched by Franklin Spirko Media, as soon as our site redesign is completed.

Remember it is easy to slam just about anyone's online efforts because there is so much to keep up with just about anyone has a hole or three you can poke at.  So try to always analyze web sites and web efforts from both view points, sure you need to spot the mistakes but look closely at the effective things as well, quite often they teach you far more. 

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: donald trump, trump blog, trump university, blogging, blogs, corporate blogging, search marketing

Popularity: 10% [?]

Recently I posted about Donald Trump's Blog.  In short I said it sucks, why, read my article for the whole story but honestly I said it sucked because Trump does not post often enough and his staff does not know how to Blog.  I had two goals with this post.

Goal One - I used the most successful person I knew that had a blog with real problems.  A blog devoid of emotion and to "salesy" if I may be permitted to create a fake word.  This was to help others who make the same mistakes.  I consult with CEOs, Presidents, etc on blogging and most make these same mistakes.  I wanted to point out these mistakes and show that even a world class billionaire was not immune to them.  The goal, make people look harder at their own blogs and be willing to see their mistakes because if someone as big as Trump made them, of course they could be doing the same thing.  

Goal Two - I was hoping that someone from Trump University would respond. Getting someone from a group like that to comment is a big success on any blog.  The results were great two staffers from Trump University responded.

One by the name of Josef Katz took my criticism in stride.  He said he had brought up some of my same concerns and was trying to effect some change and invited me to discuss this off line with him.  I have informed Mr. Katz that I am more then willing to do so if he will just tell me how to get in touch with him.  Mr. Katz is the Senior Director of Marketing at Trump University. 

The second by the name of  Barry Lenson who is an Executive Editor at Trump U.  He was less kind in his response.  He called me delusional!  I don't blame him, criticism is tough to take especially from a relatively unknown person such as myself when you are part of something with the Trump name on it.

Anyway I took both comments as a true honor to receive and wrote a very in depth response to both Mr. Katz and Mr. Lenson.  Check out the orginal post to see their comments and my response.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: donald trump, trump university, blog, blogging, business, business advice, jack spirko, online marketing, blog marketing, trump

P.S. - I actually think Donald Trump has a pretty good blog, despite the issues pointed out in this article.  To be fair I have since posted an article about the positives and the improvements at the Trump Blog.  That post is called,  -  Why Donald Trump Has a Great Blog that is Getting Even Better

Popularity: 8% [?]

About two months ago I announced the Beta Launch of Marketing ICE and commented on how much work creating a new company from nothing really is.

Well just a few days ago we opened the full live version of Marketing ICE with a new pricing model and a new sales message.  The response has been great so far.  What I want to comment on though today is the mistakes the Beta revealed to us and lessons learned from them.

1.  Our price was a bit high.  Not really because it was a hell of a deal at the price we asked, not a single paying beta member complained, NOT ONE.  Yet the reason it was too high is we figured out we could make more profit by selling for less.  All the metrics got better with a massive price cut.  If something make you more profit and is ethical then do it.  We did.

2.  Our process was clunky and relied on two levels of membership.  Paid and free.  We killed off true membership for free people simply providing them a password if they opt into our email system.  This makes our internal management a lot easier, consumes less resources and above all makes our CTO Benjamin Fitts' job a lot easier.   Oh and it converts to sales better to boot.

3.  Because we put our videos in a pass word protected area they were not getting indexed by Search Engines and we got no deep organic traffic.  Ben is a genius and figured out how to leave the pages open to anyone and password protect just the videos.  So the individual pages can now be indexed and the video is just seen as basicly an image by Google/Yahoo, etc.  

There were more mistakes (many that were technology centric) but the above were some of the bigger ones we corrected that an outsider would have been able to observe.  Now here is the real reason I am posting this, it is not the mistakes we made you should pay attention to, it is that we made them and that we fixed them even though fixing them was painful short term.  It required a lot of extra work and we had to let go of a lot of work we had done the wrong way.  We had a choice, put on the breaks, make the change and rock on.  The other choice would have been to accept the limitations we created and roll with them.

Rolling with the mistakes would have been easier and faster but a huge mistake.  Like my good friend Neil Franklin says, "when things don't work, just change them, there is no reason to stay married to stupid".  Now our mistakes were not massive but as we evaluated the long term health and success of the company they would have had a massive negative impact on the business as a whole over time.  

While the decision to adjust so early caused us to delay bringing in the revenue a new company needs while brand new and we had to delay that inflow of capital and return on our efforts it was worth it.  

I have seen so many companies from small businesses to Fortune 100 corporations stay married to an idea, a message or a purchase they made just because time and money were already invested in it.  Never mind the fact that it didn't work, or had a higher cost then a replacement or was in some cases killing the business.  The mantra of "we are locked into this now" kept them on an often destructive path.

Many people who have worked for big corporations in the past one day form a company of their own.  It can be like Marketing ICE (all online) or a primarly off line business it doesn't matter.  Most of these people bring the "we have to stick with it" and other poisonous ideas into these new businesses.  Let me tell you, it can and often will kill or cripple a new company.

There is just no reason for this to happen.  When your company is small and new it is also nimble.  There is a lot to be said for sticking to your guns when you have to get things done but when a process, message or service is not working change it or kill it, remember there is no reason to stay married to stupid,

~ Jack

Technorati Tags: business, business advice, marketing ice, online business, off line business, technology

Popularity: 8% [?]

Since I first got into Internet Marketing in 1999 I have seen a lot of really talented people specifically from an SEO stand point leave one gaping massive hole in their marketing efforts.  This may sound almost silly but this massive hole is often….

No Sales Process

Crazy?  Yes but true none the less.  I have looked at countless sites that are beautifully designed, well optimized and have exceptional traffic.  Yet the site clearly does nothing to put the visitors into the "sales cycle".

There are several things you must ask yourself all the time about your website.

1.  Do you know the primary and secondary goals of your site? 

Shockingly many site owners don't or they only have one defined goal vs. several.  Such as your site goal may be simply to make a sale of a product or service but what is your secondary goal.  Is it branding, lead collection or something else or all of these things.  You must know those goals before you can be sure your site addressed them.

2.  Does your site make accommodation for people who are at different points in their buying cycle? 

Some people are in research mode (this is why you must generate leads), some are ready to buy, some need one question answered in order to buy.  You must have resources for these people and they must be easy to find for each visitor because unfortunately you can't control which page the person always enters your site on.

3.  How can you make visitors that will never ever buy from you valuable?

Look most websites will convert fraction of traffic to a lead or a sale so almost every site has what can only be considered surplus traffic.  So how do you make that traffic profitable.  Some examples are viral marketing or advertising revenue, both can help turn your extra traffic into something of value.  You simply must be doing something with it if not you are wasting a valuable resource.

So why do I think this way?  Why is this so important to me, that I have taken the time to post about it?

Because for the first 10 years of my professional career I was not in marketing, nor in web development or design.  No, I was a sales person who sold everything from cable installations, to Ethernet hardware to high end test equipment.  In this period of my life I worked like crazy and became quite successful and eventually discovered the web and realized that it was a whole new world.  A way to sell to billions vs. the handful a single sales person could reach.

Now I would love to tell you from day one I took the sales process and put it online, I should have, it sure makes a lot of sense but I didn't.  No, like most new online marketers I started out with affiliate marketing and simply did what ever I could to push traffic to my affiliate sites.  I actually had a moderate amount of success nothing stellar mind you but I made some good extra money and sold myself on the fact that this "web thing" worked.  If I could make 20K a year well then hell I could make a lot more, right?

Then one day I sat down to do some "work" online and I realized I did not really know what I should be doing next, I might do a bit or work on ranking a site or clean up some copy but I did not really have an agenda in mind.  I was just cranking our new sites and new niches and making money with sales when they happened and was popping a bit of ad revenue as well.  

So I decided to look at all my sites the way I managed my sales people.  I asked each site, what is it that you do for me?  What are your goals?  Who are your prospects?  How well are you achieving them?  and What can we do to make you better?

I then realized something many of my sites had the problems I pointed out in the beginning of this post and to this day in some areas I am still back peddling  and tying old sites together and linking them to new sites.  It is a long hard process and some of my content will never be fully integrated because the effort to do so is better placed with new projects.

However, whenever I fix a problem I think about how much better it would have been if I thought of each site in fact each section of a site like a sales person from day one I realize how much better it could have been.  

When you create web pages you should try to line them up with sales and/or marketing positions of the off line world. 

Some are like outside sales people.  -  Closing the deals

Some are like inside sales people.  - Answering stock pre-sales questions or  just filling orders.

Some are like sales managers.  - Linking the efforts of all the other sales people together. 

Some are like marketing directors.  Building lists of leads and pumping them into the sales cycle.

In fact that is how I look at it today but I could have saved massive amounts of time and money had I done so from the beginning.  So that is my challenge to you.  Are you treating your sites and pages like what they are, sales and marketing entities with a goal and judging them on their success or failure and tying their synergies together as a team. 

In short are you treating your sites and pages like a sales and marketing team and acting as their sales and marketing manager?   If not, you may want to rethink a lot of your efforts.  Then sooner you make the change the easier it will be, 

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: sales, marketing, internet marketing, sales cycle, online sales, sales force, business, seo, sem, search marketing, search engine optimization

Popularity: 8% [?]